There is an adage among teachers that once a student has learned to do something the wrong way they have to be retaught the right way seven times before they get it right. Apparently that rule of thumb applies outside the classroom as well.

Steve Jobs has been gone nearly a month. The night he died everyone got the message he had died of pancreatic cancer. That the major media outlets almost uniformly got what he died from wrong really bothered a number of us in the NET community. I quickly put out a press release and went to the trouble of looking up the email addresses of well over 100 major newspapers, radio and TV networks so that each one could know where the error was and fix it. I know several other NET organizations did similar things.

And some media did make the correction by doing lengthy stories on what the actual form of cancer was.

But most did little or nothing to fix the popular misconception. After all, it was, apparently, just a semantic difference in their minds.

The head of Google said just over a year ago that 99% of what is on the Internet is crap. I had my nose rubbed in that fact this morning.

Every few weeks I do a search on all four major search engines for NET terms. I don’t do this because I think I will find some stories I have missed–though I do turn up a few in the process. Rather I do it to see to what degree we have been successful in moving walkingwithjane.org closer to the top of the lists. It’s called SEO–Search Engine Optimization. And the only way to really know if it is working is to go look periodically.

One of the things I tested this morning was “Steve Jobs’s Death.” Virtually every story on page one of every search named the cause of death as pancreatic cancer.

Apparently, shock jock Howard Stern was so moved by Jobs’ death from pancreatic cancer that he has made a substantial donation to an organization doing research on pancreatic cancer and has sponsored the creation of a piece of jewelry, the sale of which will benefit that organization. That it does not do research on pancreatic NET does not lessen his charitable impulse–but it does mean the money will be spent on something other than what actually killed Steve Jobs.

November 10 is the second annual Worldwide NET Cancer Awareness Day. Let’s hope it really won’t take seven of them to get this disease the awareness–and respect–it deserves.